The Cemetery Yew

by Cynthia Riggs Narrated by Davina Porter

Overview

There's more than one reason the new West Tisbury police chief officially made ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull her deputy. For one thing, Victoria knows just about everything about everyone in Martha's Vineyard, not to mention their ancestors. Victoria may be afflicted with the usual aches and pains that descend on nonagenarians-she has a cutoff shoe to accommodate her bunion and a stout stick to help her on her walks across the fields and in the woods-but she is as sharp and as sharp-eyed as the proverbial tack. So it's not odd that when Victoria is the only one who notices something amiss among the gravestones of the West Tisbury cemetery, the chief listens.

And something is indeed amiss. Responding to a request by presumed relatives in the Midwest to disinter a coffin for reburying elsewhere, things go wrong from the start. The driver of the hearse coming to collect the coffin disappears during the Island ferry trip in a rainstorm. Other deaths-some of them irrefutably murder, the others suspicious-follow. And when, as a last measure, the coffin is found, dug up, and opened, it does not contain the expected body. Adding insult to injury, the coffin itself disappears.

Meanwhile, the bedroom for rent in Victoria's house has been taken over by a woman and her raucous toucan, a bird as spoiled as the most bratty millionaire's heir. Victoria is graceful about her unwanted boarders, but they do interfere with her newspaper column-and with her efforts to discover whether the strange antics of the coffin are related to the murders.

Victoria is the most realistic and most delightful nonagenarian in mystery fiction. Her years have not blunted her intelligence nor her sharp wit.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Victoria Trumbull, the astute, 92-year-old Vineyard native and deputy police officer, takes on her most bizarre case yet, in Riggs's third appealing Vineyard mystery (after 2002's The Cranefly Orchid Murders). An empty grave, a misplaced coffin and a missing hearse driver are the harbingers of a series of grotesque murders, whose victims turn out to share an odd South American connection involving smuggling and an exotic bird. The author lends ballast to an outlandish plot by lovingly depicting ordinary island people (awkward teens, a friendly police chief, small-town officials with their rivalries and gossips) and events (notably the return of the local high school football team from the big game against Nantucket). The unfamiliar portrait of the Vineyard in winter is another plus. With patience and charm, the down-to-earth Victoria succeeds in drawing out confidences. In the end, even she is surprised. Agent, Nancy Love. (Sept. 8) Forecast: An attractive jacket, with green and red berries on a snowy yew branch, should ensure sales into the Christmas season. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Victoria Trumbull, the island's elderly poet and sleuth, wonders why a coffin meant for reburial in Milwaukee disappears. More sinister is the fact that several people interested in the coffin wind up dead. A most appealing and unusual tale. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Bodies everywhere except where they belong-in a tidy plot. Let's see. One man turns up in the West Tisbury dump, another in a mortuary fridge, another heaved over the railing of the Martha's Vineyard ferry. The only proper burial, of the young Norton girl who committed suicide ten years ago, turns out to be just as improper. When her coffin is exhumed for reburial in Wisconsin, she's not in it, just hefty bags of sand. In fact, island gossip insists she never existed in the first place. Quicker than you can say "empty plot," her coffin disappears, except for a back panel that nonagenarian sleuth Victoria Trumbull hides for safekeeping. And more skullduggery is afoot. Cancer-stricken Dahlia Atherton, a former foreign-service employee, is offered a cup of poisoned tea. Victoria averts the brewhaha, then listens while Dahlia explains her complicity in a gem-smuggling scheme and shifts blame to a double-crossing accomplice and the fence they both trusted. Two improbable plot twists later, the murders are solved, the gems have appeared and then vanished, and the Vineyard has all winter to prepare for another onslaught of tourists. Even lovers of pesky amateur sleuths and Martha's Vineyard lore will agree it's past time for Victoria (The Cranefly Orchid Murders, 2002, etc.) to retire for good.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169664898
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Series:	Martha's Vineyard Mysteries , #3
Edition description:	Unabridged

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